New Beginning Guide by Fourmi
Introduction (Taken from the Quest Book) Welcome to your new home, it may be small now, but soon, you will have a thriving island for you and your fiends (if you want to share it). You might be looking around you and wondering where to start, just follow these quests and you will be on your way to automation in no time. This guide is going to focus on the completion of the first tab of the Quest Book entitled "New Beginning". I will be giving additional comments and explanation on what each quest requires and how to achieve it. This guide will mostly target new players to the Skyblock type, but also explain differences that this modpack has with other Ex Nihilo Skyblocks. Before Beginning Disclaimer: this guide targets the version 1.2.11, and is currently on construction Following the steps explain on the guide Getting Started, you will be on the top of a single Oak Tree, on a small Indigo Octogonal island with a diameter of 9 squares. If you are playing solo, look at the Biome you are starting on, as it can make the beginning much harder (i.e. no rain in deserts). If this is the case, I recommend to restart, using a different seed. Having mobs is mandatory for progression in a SkyBlock, although not at the start. That said, difficulty should not be set to Peaceful. Finally, this modpack has OreExcavation (AKA VeinMiner), JourneyMap, and BetterQuesting. That means you might want, in the Controls menu, to set, for the following Hotkeys: * BetterQuesting -> Open Quests = This will allow you to use the Quest Book without having it in your Hotbar, thus freeing you up inventory space. * JourneyMap -> Waypoint Manager = New Players (and even Veteran ones) often fall to their death in Skyblocks, so you probably want to delete all these Death's Waypoint. * OreExcavation -> Excavate = Also Known As VeinMiner, this will allow to use a tool in a NxNxN Cubic Region of the same blocks sharing at least one corner in a single animation. This can be a time-saver when hammering stacks on stacks on Cobblestones, or chopping many trees. It only works when having an item in your hand, but will use an equal amount of durability as if you had use the tool to remove each seperate block. The First Quest (Taken from the Quest Book) Now what? It may not look like there's very much here, but you will be surprised. Cut down the one tree you have and make a crafting table. Remember to save at least one sapling, otherwise you're going to be in trouble! Start by destrying the first row of leaves on your tree, then the first Oak log you can take, so you can craft a Crafting Table. I recommend converting into a Tinker's Crafting Station, as it will still count for the quest, and start progression for early Tinker's. Once this accomplished, wait several seconds for the Quest to detect the task has been completed, and there should be a popup, in the top portion of the screen, with a sound notifcation. Claim your reward and on with the second quest. Ex Nihilo Creatio's Crooks (Taken from the Quest Book) Now you have yourself some wood, you can start expanding your island and build yourself a crafting table and some chests to store your new stuff. Place your newly acquired Crafting Station into the hole where the Oak Log was. The Crafting Station is like a Crafting Table, for all intense and purpose, but with additional feature, such as Rotate Grid, Balance Grid and so on. Holding Shift while having items in selected will 3 different features the Crafting Station can do. In combination with JEI (the menu on the right, when opening the Inventory or using a Crafting Station) will allow you to see the recipes to craft an item, how to acquire it, and how it can be used for other recipes. If, when clicking on an item, it is giving, it is because the "Cheat Mode" has been activated. This can be toggle by clicking on the wrench, next to the search bar, in the bottom right corner. To craft your first crook, open the Crafting Station, then type the word "crook" in the search. Transform two oak planks into Sticks, then click on the "Wooden Crook". When having the recipe displayed, click on the + button, and JEI will automatically retrieve items from your inventory or a nearby chest to set up the recipe in the Crafting Station. Finally, craft your first Wooden Crook. A crook is an item that increase the chance of drops from leaves (i.e. Oak Sapling, Apples, Silkworms and Bird's nests from Oak Leaves). With your nearly acquired crook, stand on your Crafting Station, then hold the OreExcavation key (default grave) and destroy all the leaves on your oak tree. This should filled your inventory with all the drops, which should include 0-25 oak sapling, 0-10 apples, 0-10 silkworms, 0-5 bird's nests. Keep your Silkworms, as we will need them for a quest later. Bird's nest are essential one-time use loot chest, which contains item that varies from seeds, feathers, vanilla ore nuggets, vanilla dusts, and so on. Apples can be an alternative food source, but it is best to keep them until you can use them in recipe for superior food. You may still want to eat one to count toward the amount of different food you ate, which increases your total heart (up to 20) for each step of N food consumed. Once this is done, pick your Crafting Station back, then OreExcavate the remaining Oak logs. You may notice that your island also have Purple Shulker Box on each Cardinal Point. These act as chest, and can be upgraded. Drop the slikwork, an oak sapling, the quest book, and all your Oak logs into one, then place your Crafting Station next to it. Craft another Wooden Crook and start using your new one (keeping the damaged one for repairs), via crafting two crooks together, adding their durability and a +5% bonus on the sum. Plant an Oak Sapling on your single Dirt Block, then start "twerking" next to it. This concise to rapidly tap crouch, to emulate giving bone meal to the Oak Sapling and not waiting for it to grow. Keep repeating the process of breaking the leaves with your crook, collecting Oak Logs, opening Bird's nests and planing new Oak Saplings until you have enough to claim your reward. Ex Compressum's Compressed Crook (Taken from the Quest Book) A 9x better version of the crook. From the last quest, convert some of the Oak Logs and Wooden Planks into sticks, and craft 9 Crooks. Then, place them into the Crafting Station to craft a Compressed Crook. Compressed Crooks are basically the same as crooks, but with a high durability. This allows a single tool to be used for several trees before breaking apart. Claim your reward and on to own next quest. String (Taken from the Quest Book) Before you can get sieving for seeds, your sieve is going to need a mesh, and for that, you need string. Craft a crook and use it to break leaves. Eventually, you will find a silkworm which you can use to infest a tree with. Wait for the leaves to be fully infected then break them to harvest the string. From the last two quests, you most likely already have gotten several silkworms. A single one can infected an entire tree farm, as long as each tree's leave connect to one another, but the process to infecting all leaves can take time. It is possible to infect several location on a tree to accelerate the infectation, but it will also consume more silkworms. Silkworms are also a source of early game food, once you can cook them, so it good to keep a dozen, until you can start either a farm, a husbandry or an orchid. After your tree is fully infecting, use your newly crafted compressed crook to collect about 2/3 of a stack of strings, which is more than often to complete your quest. Ex Nihilo Creatio's Wooden Barrel (Taken from the Quest Book) You're probably going to need more dirt before you can grow enough food. You can make some wooden barrels from some planks, which you should have plenty of by now. These barrels can be used to make dirt when organic matter like leaves and saplings are added. Wooden Barrels is a wink to composting, which transforms almost any organic matter, from food to plants, and giving a simple block of dirt. It is a slow process, but the way to go early on. You can review all the different methods of converting items into dirt with in NEI. Type barrel in the Search bar, then right-click on the wooden barrel. The conversion ratio to dirt will be displayed on the Compost tab. A wooden barrel can be crafted by filling the first and last column with wooden planks, and placing a wooden plank slab on the middle bottom row, forming a U-shaped. Claim your reward, then place your newly crafted barrel on the floor, near a shulker box. If you have over a dozen saplings, place some in the barrels by right-clicking them on the barrel. It should take 8 saplings to fill the barrel and start converting them into a block of dirt. Ex Nihilo Creatio's Sieve and String Mesh (Taken from the Quest Book) The Sieve is (as the name indicated) used to sieve small particles from less consistent blocks, such as Sand or Gravel. The blocks to sieve are applied by right-clicking on the sieve holding them. After that, the sieve has to be right-clicked until the item is fully sieved. Then the items sieves out of the block drop from the sieve. WARNING: the block used to sieve the items will be completely lost then! To sieve dirt, you're going to need a string mesh. You should have plenty of string by now, from your infected trees, all you need is 9. Again, you can review all the different rewards from sieveing blocks, depending on the type of mesh and sieved blocks. Right now, the only source way to sieve will be by using dirt on a string mesh in order to obtain various seeds and pebbles, which will help us progress. Crafting a sieve requires a mix of sticks, wooden planks and slabs, so it is best to use the trick of left-clicking the sieve within the Crafting Station to automatically place the recipe's blocks and items to craft your mesh. Complete you quest and place the sieve next to a shukler box. Crafting a String Mesh requires a full 3x3 crafting grid of strings. Claim your reward, then right-click the String Mesh on the Sieve to attach it. Wooden Hammer, Compressed Wooden Hammer, Multiblock sieve and Shears (Taken from the Quest Book) Hammers can be used to smash blocks into smaller 'pieces'. Stone materials will, for example, turn into the finer category of stone. Compressed Hammers are needed to break compressed blocks. They are also useful to break regular blocks. Tired of all the sifting? If you place down another sieve, anywhere in a 2 block radius around the first, and place the same type of mesh in it, you can sift simultaneously up to 25 blocks, being the max size a 5x5 square. Give it a try. Early game version of the shear. Hammers can be used to break the following: * Cracked Andasite -> Sand * Cracked Diorite -> Dust * Cracked Granite -> Red Sand * Netherack -> Cracked Netherack * Endstone -> Cracked Endstone * Concrete -> Concrete Powder Anything a Hammer can do, a Compressed Hammer also does, with the additional of the following: * Cobblestone -> Gravel * Andasite -> Sand * Diorite -> Dust * Granite -> Red Sand Hammers can also break down wooden logs into saw dust, which can be used as a compost to get dirt. In combination with leaves (obtained with a wooden shears) and saplings, this will help you get the necessary dirt to start obtaining pebbles and seeds. You will probably want to expand your island with some wooden planks or slabs, or even some random blocks you received from the loot chests. Then, start placing more dirts to allow more than one tree to be planted simultaneously. Placing a 2x2 Sieve with String Mesh will allow 4 simulaneous dirt to be sieved, and this can be done up to a 5x5, while sieve from the centermost sieve. Start grinding some ressources, by having a stack of sticks, wooden planks, oak logs and half a stack of dirt, which will help with progression. Don't forget to claim all of your rewards, as we just completed several quests.